Month: May 2009

  • White Roses

    By now you have probably heard of Energy Secretary Chu’s plan to paint the roofs in America white to fight global warming. He should have had a talk with Alice about the big mistake that was made in Wonderland by painting the roses red. So how about some appropriate mood music? Cross Posted at Power…

  • My Sunday morning suicide mission

    As if there wasn’t enough wrong with Justice Sotomayor, now we learn she is against the Second Amendment: Just six months after Heller, however, Sotomayor issued an opinion in Maloney v. Cuomo that the protections of the Second Amendment do not apply to the states, and that if your city or state wants to ban…

  • I blame the culture for my cultural illiteracy, Part II

    Well, I have to blame something, don’t I? There’s some fat woman whose picture I keep seeing every day at Drudge, and I haven’t been interested because it looks like a plug for a TV show or something. This morning, (after having seen her picture for probably the 20th time), I figured I should check…

  • Keep Yo Effn Mouth Shut

    Will we still have a Constitutional Republic in four years? I have my doubts. A new White House policy on permissible lobbying on economic recovery and stimulus projects has taken a decidedly anti-First Amendment turn. It’s a classic illustration of Big Government trying to control every aspect of a particular activity and in the process…

  • Islamic Crusades – British Rule Of India

    Islamic Crusades: An Introduction Islamic Crusades 1: The Occupation of Constantinople Islamic Crusades 2: Before Islam… Egypt, Iran, Iraq Islamic Crusades 3: The Co-Option of Jerusalem Islamic Crusades 4: Lessons From the Thai Jihad Islamic Crusades 5: Why did they hate us in 1783? Islamic Crusades 6: India’s Millennial Burden Islamic Crusades 7: India’s Modern…

  • So who owns “socialism”?

    A question which has been plaguing me lately is whether it is possible to have a legitimate debate over socialism without sounding like a rabid, hysterical, over-the-top, far-right conspiracy theorist. It would be nice to have time for an essay-length discussion, but I don’t. The problem is, for some time I’ve been convinced that socialism…

  • A Doctor Talks About Medical Cannabis

    A poster on the Drug Policy Forum of Texas list suggested the above video in the context of a University of California at San Francisco course on cannabis therapeutics that is accredited by the AMA and the ANA (American Nurses Association). Here is what the www site has to say about the accreditation. The University…

  • Clouds And Climate – New Ideas Not Welcome

    Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 I have done a number of posts on the subject of how cosmic rays affect clouds and climate including: Magnetized Weather And The Lost Concensus Global Warming Not So Hot Clouds More Clouds Model Prediction Climate Alchemy – Turning Hot Air Into Gold Clouds In Chambers Feedbacks…

  • Liberals love germs!
    And germophobia is a symptom of… conservatism!

    I realize some people have personal stakes in the liberal versus conservative dichotomy, but is there any end to this conservative liberal diagnostic crap? If you want to tell whether someone is conservative or liberal, what are a couple of completely nonpolitical questions that will give a good clue? How’s this: Would you be willing…

  • Double Post

    For those of you who have noticed the double post of “The Death of Copyright” my apologies. I left the title off the first post and decided to repost it with the title and delete the previous version. A simple matter on blogspot. With the Six Apart software used here it is a total pain…

  • The Death Of Copyright

    What the Motion Picture industry has not figured out is that the price of any product will go down to its marginal cost. How do you make a profit in such an environment? Volume. The difficulty of course that the available time for watching movies is limited. So let us look at what my internet…

  • A racist liberal agenda that’s kept in the closet

    The fact that racism lurks behind much of the gun control impulse is not a new topic at this blog. Among the things I’ve discussed over the years have been my personal experience with gun control advocates; Clayton Cramer’s groundbreaking work on the subject (and his documentation that racist gun control efforts even included dog…

  • Supplying humor for serious times?

    Watching a recent White House press conference video at Politico, I am more convinced than ever that the White House is having fun and games with the Birth Certificate Truthers. (FWIW, I have tried to take their arguments seriously, but the whole thing seems designed to be immune to serious debate; I think that even…

  • How to make crime disappear

    While I moved to Ann Arbor last August, I haven’t spent much time in Detroit. Although I want to check out the cool ruins, people have told me not to go, as it’s not only a high crime place, but if you call the cops they’ll never come. This isn’t why I haven’t gone there…

  • ITER Delayed, Scaled Back

    Nature News is reporting that the ITER fusion experiment is in big trouble. Very big trouble. It is way over budget, way behind time, and the experimental efforts are being scaled back. ITER — a multi-billion-euro international experiment boldly aiming to prove atomic fusion as a power source — will initially be far less ambitious…

  • The Hookers Are Well Educated

    Spengler at Asia Times is looking at the portents from Iran and sees a collapse coming. And as per usual he uses his favorite metric. Whores. The man is obsessed. I can, however, appreciate his obsession. Until very recently, an oil-price windfall gave the Iranian state ample resources to pursue its agenda at home and…

  • Climate Modelers At Work

    The picture (Climate Modelers At Work) is from a Popular Science article discussing an MIT (yeah THAT MIT) paper predicting doomsday if the Chinese and Indians don’t stop improving the lives of their citizens with more and better electrical supplies using their coal resources. Well not really. It is only American policy that is in…

  • No ordinary reporter

    When I saw the Drudge headline that a reporter had been dragged kicking and screaming for wanting to give President Obama a letter, naturally my curiosity was aroused. The picture links this story: A reporter for a small newspaper was forcibly removed from a press area near Air Force One shortly before President Barack Obama…

  • Are things getting to be unprecedented?

    Whether I like it or not, this is supposed to be a political blog, not a self-indulgent forum for posts about personal irrelevancies like being awakened in the middle of the night by bats. Anyone reading that post might think, “What has any of this to do with the serious problems posed by Barack Obama?”…

  • light night flight

    Last night after 1:00 a.m. I was rudely awakened by a home invader. Well, actually, it was my trusty watchdog Coco who awakened me by barking and lunging at the window from the bed. As I was already fast asleep, the commotion entered my dream state, and gradually caused the dream to merge into a…